THE FLIGHT OF THE WOOD-NYMPHS. 435 



medium, and Brown and Eepton guided the taste of the 

 improver in all his operations. The rustic cottage was 

 removed to a distant spot, and a splendid Italian villa 

 was erected in the place of it. No labor nor money was 

 spared in the effort to give it all the external and internal 

 finish which would be needful to adorn a palace. Every 

 piece of work was tasteful and correct ; no counterfeit 

 imitations of valuable ornaments were allowed ; and when 

 the edifice was completed, the most scientific architect 

 could find no fault with it. It stood forth proudly on the 

 brow of the hill, one of the masterpieces of villa architec- 

 ture. 



The elegance of the mansion made it the more apparent 

 that the grounds must be improved, that the appearance 

 of nature might harmonize with the work of the archi- 

 tect. On the grassy slope that fronted the cottage,' there 

 were occasional projections of the rock that was buried 

 underneath the soil, and around them various _species of 

 wild shrubbery had come up in many a tufted knoll. 

 These prominences were split off, and covered with loam, 

 and the whole surface was graded into a beautifully even 

 and rounded lawn. The wood-anemone, the mouse-ear, and 

 the saxifrage no longer spangled the grassy slope in early 

 spring, nor the aster nor the golden-rod stood there to wel- 

 come the arrival of autumn. But tulips grew proudly in 

 a fanciful border of spaded earth under the side windows 

 in the opening of the year, and verbenas, portulaccas, and 

 calceolarias outshone all the native summer beauties of 

 the landscape. 



Surrounding the fields that adjoined the cottage was an 

 old stone-wall, gray with lichens and covered with numer- 

 ous wild vines that had clustered round it, as the ivy 

 intwines itself round the walls of ruined castles and 

 abbeys in the Old World. The clematis overshadowed it 

 with flowers and foliage in summer, and with its beauti- 



